Running across the Rooves of Empire

Running across the Rooves of Empire
This article takes a common strand of space and power, mediated by comparative notions of
empire and its memory. It focuses initially on Quebec City, discussing the relations there
between topography and power, in the socio-spatial, including imagined, arrangements that
pertain to the division between upper and lower towns, tourist/administrative core and
banlieue, as well as the original tension between the administrated city and the vast North
American – and native - hinterland. These relations have persisted and adapted in the
contexts of the first French empire and its replacement by the British, and in the
contemporary city, which in some ways can be seen as on the periphery of the American
empire. The central text discussed is a 1998 novel by Pierre Gobeil, Sur le toit des maisons,
in which two disaffected young men journey from the lower town to the river by climbing
across the rooves of the city. The second half of the article links this to the phenomenon of
parkour, in which 'free-runners' trace alternative pathways through urban space and which
originated in the Paris banlieue. Discussion of parkour centres on Michel de Certeau's
alternative mappings of the city, but the argument here also invokes embedded,
imagined histories and memories of colonial space, and the problem of narrative
representation and its ideological resolutions, emphasising the ambivalent tensions in the
phenomenon, and in de Certeau, between order and resistance. The colonial dimension is
manifest not only in the parallels of policing and social apartheid which persist in the French
banlieues, but even in official recuperation of the parkour phenomenon in, the action films
Yamakasi and Banlieue 13, which dramatise these contradictions and memories. The article
thus alludes to both the first and second French empires, as well as to the role of differently
lived francophone histories in the formation of youth narratives and subcultures.
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An engraving – much imitated throughout that century - published in Claude-Charles
Le Roy de La Potherie‟s Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale of 1722 captures Quebec City
from an observation point to the east, on the St Lawrence but at an „impossible‟ point above
the water, the view framing the town from the Cap aux Diamants on the left to the mouth of
the St Charles on the right (figure 1). The city‟s foundation here was after all „where the river
narrows‟, kebec in Algonquin: a site which was fortifiable, defensible, with access to the
Atlantic and where the original fur trade monopoly could be easily policed. The
ornementality of the sailing ships glimpsed in the foreground of the image is confirmed by
the clear view afforded above them towards the Haute Ville, where the monumental building
work that had taken place during the French regime, housing political and ecclesiastical
authority in principally a Governor‟s Palace, Cathedral, Seminary, Jesuit College, and
Ursulines Convent, is exaggeratedly visible. Here the conventions of royal and court power
construct a European view of the town - of what the monarch might himself have gazed upon
– which is assimilated by local elites.
In contrast, the period of British rule (and of the integration of the former New France
into British imperial networks of trade, military strategy, and capital accumulation) that
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began officially in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris, following Wolfe‟s military victory in 1759,
was marked by a multiplication of points of view. At first these were bound up with military
agendas but they also included notions of the picturesque - now extended from the domestic
to new imperial domains - and of the painter‟s subjectivity, as the viewpoint became explicit
rather than abstract. This multiplication also meant therefore that views from the Haute Ville
were now more common. A good example is James Pattison Cockburn‟s The Lower City of
Quebec, from the Parapet of the Upper City, 1833 (figure 2).
This way of looking not only mobilised Romantic forms of subjectivity in relation to the
beauty of the city‟s site it also, by the first half of the nineteenth century, played on its
connotations of the pre-modern and pre-industrial, conjuring an early tourism which by 1879
reached a culmination in the construction of the terrasse Dufferin, named after the GovernorGeneral who three years earlier had encouraged the City Council to foresee „one continuous
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uninterrupted pathway for pedestrians‟, „a walk which for its convenience, freedom from
noise, danger and interruption, for the variety and beauty of its points of view, and for its
historical and civic interest, will be absolutely unequalled‟ (quoted in Geronimi, 2003, p.
127). In the contemporary, post-Quiet Revolution and nationalist era, the old city as
promenade through hundreds of lieux de mémoire of Quebec history, and those of Frenchspeaking North America, completes the picture.
However, there is another side to Quebec City which is ignored by these „top-down‟
configurations of looking at or from, and of moving through, the cityscape. The narrowness
of the land between the heights and the St Lawrence that had formed the terrain of Samuel de
Champlain‟s very first constructions in 1608 meant that the lower part of the town expanded
around and behind the Haute Ville, along the estuary of the tributary that flows into the St
Lawrence, the St Charles: the faubourg of St Roch (named after the patron saint of lost
causes) was incorporated in 1752, after becoming a place of banishment when a general
hospital was constructed there in 1692 housing the blind, the insane, the paralysed and the
poor who were not to dwell at the Hôtel-Dieu in town. It was later to house a cholera
hospital, and became the main working-class district with the city‟s industrialisation in the
nineteenth century, particularly in the second half when cheap labour from a rural exodus
came to work in shoe and garment manufacture. Although prosperous and commercial by the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with all the trappings of nascent North
American consumerism such as department stores and tall buildings, it remained banished
from the city‟s self-image. Indeed, until very recently, the district continued to suffer from
the homology between physical and social elevation that characterized class division in the
city, as well as from the marginalization of the inner city in the expansion of the suburbs.
Already in the 1930s the French geographer Raoul Blanchard had noted how this suburbia
had reconfigured the city: „Québec devient une ville de plaine avec des annexes sur la
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colline‟ (Blanchard, 1935, p. 292). This is Quebec City as Los Angeles rather than as a
remnant or offshoot of an older European culture: a network of freeways, detached houses
and shopping malls that takes place exclusively in French, with rates of car ownership that far
exceed those in Montreal. Between 1961 and 1976, the regional population rose from
358,000 to 543,000, yet Quebec City itself saw its population drop by 38,000. Within these
developments, the image of St Roch that has come to dominate is that of a transit zone,
through which one passes either socially (on the way, hopefully, to life in the Haute Ville), or
physically (direct links between the Haute Ville and the banlieue impelling the destruction of
part of the district to make way for a motorway that ends on parliament hill, taking the civil
servants of the 1960s Quiet Revolution to their offices). The motorway pillars are the site of a
very active graffiti culture. Today, the district‟s future seems bound up with a revalorisation
of its history and an artistic vocation impelled by the installation there of Laval University‟s
School of Visual Arts.
In all these instances – ancien regime and first French Empire, British colonialism,
the tourist gaze, industrial capitalism, technocratic organisation, postmodern consumerism –
the space of Quebec City has been the object of what Michel de Certeau designates as
„strategies‟:
J‟appelle stratégie le calcul (ou la manipulation) des rapports de forces qui devient
possible à partir du moment où un sujet de vouloir et de pouvoir (une entreprise, une
armée, une cité, une institution scientifique) est isolable. Elle postule un lieu
susceptible d‟être circonscrit comme un propre et d‟être la base d‟où gérer les
relations avec une extériorité de cibles ou de menaces (de Certeau, 1990, p. 59).
A 1998 novel by Pierre Gobeil, Sur le toit des maisons, explores the hierarchies,
visualities, and itineraries inherent to, and possible within, the strategic, in this sense,
mappings of Quebec City that are embedded in histories of empire, territory, capitalism. On
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the night of their middle school leaving dance and of the summer solstice, two (unnamed in
the text) sixteen-year old boys – who have in fact been the two leading lights of the school‟s
geography society (and one of whom is the novel‟s first person narrator) – begin a journey
across the rooftops of the city:
Je me rappelle que du pare-chocs d‟un camion au capot d‟un autobus, de la couverture
d‟un garage jusqu‟au faîte d‟une église, tout nous semblait facile. Les constructions
s‟enchaînaient les unes à la suite des autres comme un gros mécano et lorsque à cause
d‟un feu ou d‟une demolition, notre enterprise s‟avérait plus hardue, on trouvait
toujours un madrier ou une échelle, un bout de corde ou une clôture de planches à
laquelle nous raccrocher (Gobeil, 1998, 29).
This is the domain, then, not of „strategy‟ but of what de Certeau calls „tactics‟, of the
absence of that „propre‟ associated with the demarcations of rational control in favour of a
„tour de passe-passe‟, combining „des éléments audacieusement rapprochés pour insinuer
l‟éclair d‟autre chose dans le langage d‟un lieu‟ (p. 62). These „trajectoires indéterminées‟,
apparently meaningless because they do not fit into the grids of „l‟espace bâti, écrit et
préfabriqué où elles se déplacent‟, are in fact „phrases imprévisibles‟ within „un lieu ordonné
par les techniques organisatrices de systèmes‟ (p. 57). „Tactics‟ vigilantly take advantage of
Les failles que les conjonctures particulières ouvrent dans la surveillance du pouvoir
propriétaire. Elle y braconne. Elle y crée des surprises. Il lui est possible d‟être là où
on ne l‟attend pas. Elle est ruse (p. 61).
Thus the Quebec City boys have only the chimneys they have passed to map out their
progress: „elles sont tout ce qui nous reste pour faire le décompte des stations‟ (Gobeil, 1998,
p. 32). The litany of street names is here about familiarity and investments of meaning
(„enchantement‟: Gobeil, p. 33) rather than A to Z map reading („Ces noms créent du non6
lieu dans les lieux; ils les muent en passages‟, creating an imaginary rather than literal
geography; de Certeau, 1990, p. 156). The boys‟ movement is akin to dancing („Comme des
danseurs, nous relevons la tête ensemble‟, Gobeil, p. 34), which for de Certeau exemplifies
the stylisation (rather than usage) which can characterise everyday practices of walking
(another „figure cheminatoire‟) in the city, when literal and systemic mapping is left behind
in favour of the stroller‟s magnification of certain details („singularités grossies‟) and
elimination of others (the „îlots séparés‟ which make walking like hop-scotch: „toute marche
continue à sauter, ou à sautiller, comme l‟enfant‟, de Certeau, p. 153). Indeed, the figure of
the child is crucial in the novel: the adolescent boys as between child and adult; the memory,
prompted by old pop hits even at the dance-hall before they set off on their journey, of „cette
époque des culottes courtes où nous nous égarions dans les rues de la Basse-Ville‟ (Gobeil,
24) and which then reinvests, through re-enchantment, their experience on the rooves:
Québec s‟étendait à nos pieds comme une vieille habitude qu‟on aurait souhaité voir
disparaître et, curieusement (...) c‟était des images de notre enfance qui remontaient à
la surface, comme ce plein ciel sur les plus vieilles montagnes du monde, ce trou entre
les pierres où les amoureux se cachaient dans l‟herbe et ces flûtes criardes qui n‟en
finissaient plus de résonner dans nos poitrines tant nous semblaient hauts et
magnifiques les marche-pieds des camions (Gobeil, pp. 40-41).
De Certeau celebrates such (re)creations of an „espace de jeu‟ (p. 159), but also follows
Freud, creating analogies between the condensations/metaphors and
displacements/metonymies characteristic of language, of walking, as we have seen, and of the
dreamwork. He thus comes to argue that these tactical practices of space, this ability, in fact,
to dream a place („ce qui peut être rêvé du lieu‟, p. 163), is linked to childhood negotiations
of separation from the mother, of absence and of otherness: „Pratiquer l‟espace, c‟est donc
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répéter l‟expérience jubilatoire et silencieuse de l‟enfance; c‟est, dans le lieu, être autre et
passer à l’autre‟ (p. 164).
However, the juxtaposition of Gobeil‟s novel and of de Certeau‟s cultural theory also
points to ambiguities in both. In Sur le toit des maisons, the boys‟ itinerary takes them from
the west side of Saint-Sauveur (initially a workers‟ village outside the city limits, but which
became an extension of Saint-Roch and was then incorporated into the ever expanding city in
1889) eastwards to the Saint-Roch covered mall. This, we recall, is the overcrowded, initially
working-class lower town on the north side of the high plateau on which sits the Haute Ville.
Their first glimpse of the latter is that of the city walls, stretching from east to west „telle une
meringue accrochée à un gateau de mariés‟ (p. 28). The transition from Lower to Upper
Town at the Saint-Roch end is marked by the difficult scaling of the cliff, as they crawl
underneath electricity cables, and by the textual division to the second section, „La Haute
Ville‟. However, that vertical mapping of the city‟s class and erstwhile ethnic divisions, so
central to its self-image, is not here explored historically. The Saint-Sauveur district‟s role as
one of the sites in Quebec popular culture of the construction of the „national‟ people, in
novels by Roger Lemelin (Au pied de la pente douce, 1947; Les Plouffe, 1948, with their
radio and television soap opera, and cinematic, spin-offs) that weave ambivalent relationships
with the British Empire and with Canada, is not explored. Indeed, as de Certeau argues of
Parisian street names, here names such as Verdun, Mazenod (after a nineteenth-century
French missionary), Garagonthié (after a native leader who negotiated for the French with the
Iroquois), St François, Dorchester (after a British Governor-General), lose their „légitimations
historiques‟, like the inscribed value on used coins becomes erased, but continue to mean
something, now polysemically, in the minds and memories of those who pass through them:
ils se détachent des endroits qu‟ile étaient censés définir et servent de rendez-vous
imaginaires à des voyages que, mués en métaphores, ils déterminent pour des raisons
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étrangères à leur valeur originelle mais des raisons sues/insues des passants. Etrange
toponymie, décollée des lieux, planant au-dessus de la ville comme une géographie
nuageuse de <<sens>> en attente (de Certeau, p. 157).
In Sur le toit des maisons, however, this geography not only „takes off‟ from places
themselves, so do the geographers; „Nous avions parcouru toute la ville de Québec sans
toucher par terre‟ (Gobeil, p. 69), and they dream of doing so in the decidedly non-urban
itineraries that might take them towards the American frontier or along the chemin du roy to
Montreal. Even before they reach the climactic point, on a roof on the rue des Jardins in the
Old Town, the boys had been entranced by the panorama looking north over the St Charles,
enumerating the bridges, creating in fact a map: „C‟est facile lorsqu‟à partir d‟un point dans
le ciel, on avance en recréant la ville en morceaux comme on le ferait sur une carte‟ (Gobeil,
p. 42). For this boys‟ story is also one of would-be transcendence, another key to its tendency
to de-historicise: „Tu penses qu‟on pourra survoler la ville, vaincre nos peurs et voir
apparaître, en même temps, et les montagnes et le fleuve?‟ (Gobeil, p. 31). That
transcendence meshes with forms of myth-making central to the French-Canadian
experience: a nomadism, or an aspiration to nomadism (the key figure of the coureur de bois,
the masculine figure escaping ancien régime regulation and „going native‟ in the North
American hinterland); the haunting presence of the „forêt originelle‟ (Gobeil, p. 95) so close
to the city, intensifying the relationship between „civilisation‟ and „wilderness‟, the homely
and the uncanny; and a very northern fascination with the exotic – a tropical otherness kept
enticing and manageable because of its distance from the self or the same, or because of its
presence on a coloured map (the boys‟ infatuation with „Cayenne‟, e.g. pp. 103, 111).
In fact, the romantic survol is here at times linked to the great Foucauldian repoussoir
to de Certeau‟s micro-resistances, namely the panoptic vision of surveillance famously
evoked in his pages on the World Trade Centre in New York, which „mue en lisibilité la
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complexité de la ville et fige en un texte transparent son opaque mobilité‟ (de Certeau, p.
141). The fact that Gobeil‟s narrator has it both ways is encapsulated in his invocation of Jack
Kerouac. That exemplar of French-Canadian nomadism (he was of course born to Québécois
immigrant parents in Massachusetts, and French was his first language) is here referenced as
being both on the road and panoptic: his time working as a fire lookout in Oregon (recounted
in his Lonesome Traveler, 1960).
The narrator‟s companion – and the initiator of the journey - dies when he falls, or
jumps, from the roof in the rue des Jardins. The third part of the novel, „Finale‟, is thus a
retrospective journey, retracing the steps – and trying to make sense of - the first. In the
shopping mall at St Roch, the narrator rails against the „monde de compartiments‟ (Gobeil, p.
84) which is the supermarket with its cash registers and trolleys all in a line, to the point of
wanting to break the glass and tear up the plan of the shopping centre inside (p. 84). Now
alienated by the city, he engages in another itinerary, through the forest to the foot of the
Laurentian mountains to the north. The imaginary (narrative) resolution to this real
(ideological) contradiction (how, for example, to reconcile adolescence and adulthood, past
and future, leaving and staying, nomadism and sedentariness, as in Kerouac‟s forest lookout
post?) takes place when, indeed, he climbs a pine tree and gazes back towards the city at
night: „C‟est intriguant, une ville, vue de loin‟ (Gobeil, p. 112). Finally, the narrator achieves
a reconcilation of sorts, as befits his physical position here, with the self-renewing,
impenetrable mass of the city‟s core, the Haute Ville, as, „sans m‟en vouloir et avec une
infinie patience, elle était descendue des plaines, pour s‟en venir reprendre sa place, là où
nous la connaissions depuis notre enfance, dans le ciel de la Basse-Ville de Québec‟ (Gobeil,
113).
Before tackling a better known example of the uses of de Certeau in examining
fictions and other cultural practices of urban space, three qualifying adjustments need to be
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posited in the light of the text just discussed. The first is about fictions and narratives. The
latter are key to de Certeau‟s understanding of the practices of everyday life: they are about
doing and making, permitting diversities of action in a pre-established space. However, the
example of the „resolution‟ to be found in Sur le toit des maisons poses questions about what
happens when those practices, those „récits‟, are themselves put into narrative form and
partake therefore of an interaction of social/historical and aesthetic forces, raising questions
about a „readability‟ distinct from that of an „administration fonctionnaliste‟ (de Certeau,
144) but also from the unpredictable „unreadability‟ of everyday practice. In crude terms,
Gobeil‟s text to an extent literalises de Certeau‟s proposition that „la vie urbaine laisse de
plus en plus remonter ce que le projet urbanistique en excluait‟ (de Certeau, p. 144): a
„remontée‟ certainly happens, but its contradictoriness, as we have seen, invites
interpretations of the kind Fredric Jameson describes in The Political Unconscious, as „the
rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or
restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext‟ (Jameson, 1981, p. 81). If this first
point is about narrative representations of the narrative practices of everyday life, the second
point would stress, to a greater extent than de Certeau himself, the way in which the binary
oppositions he deploys are to be understood as fields of tensions caught in interrelation:
carte (seeing, totalising, knowing) and parcours (finding and making paths, moving) may be
useful distinctions, and historically the former has displaced the latter, but in reality a
spectrum of oscillating positions exists between them (de Certeau, pp. 175-180).
The history of (literal) maps is that of the erasure of figures which refer to the
parcours (journeys, explorations) which made the map possible. De Certeau is clear that this
„colonising‟ process (p. 178) is of a piece with the contemporary „rationalité technocratique‟
(p. 65) which characterises post-war French urban life. On the other side of the coin, the
devalued and often invisible practices and ruses of contemporary life are seen to multiply as
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rational organisation expands and intensifies. Instead of taking place in stable localised
environments,
les tactiques se désorbitent. Désancrées des communautés traditionnelles qui en
circonscrivaient le fonctionnement, elles se mettent à errer partout dans un espace qui
s‟homogénéise et s‟étend. Les consommateurs se muent en immigrants. Le système
où ils circulent est trop vaste pour les fixer quelque part, mais trop quadrillé pour
qu‟ils puissent jamais lui échapper et s‟exiler ailleurs. Il n‟y a plus d‟ailleurs (de
Certeau, pp. 65-66).
My third preliminary point, then, is about the need to historicise further de Certeau‟s
analyses. If colonialism and its history are central to the development of his distinctions (and
indeed he argues at one point that, as far as practices and tactics are concerned, „nos voyages
partent au loin y découvrir ce dont la présence chez nous est devenue méconnaissable‟; p.
82), then questions are raised about their place in post-colonial societies: what does it mean
for „us‟ to be all immigrants now, de-localised in an ever-expanding domain of
administration? In addition, what relations are there between the tactics here described and
collective resistances in either national (the absent „people‟ of Sur le toit des maisons, as we
have seen) or class terms? The implications of this longer quotation from de Certeau, very
much of its epoch, that of the 1980s, of the decline of grand emancipatory narratives and the
generalisation of consumer cultures, are, not only that there is no position outside the
„system‟ (administrative, capitalist), but, more pessimistically, that the strategy-tactics
relation contributes to the self-regulation of that system, what Meaghan Morris describes as
„a programmed feature of capitalist culture‟ (Morris, 1992, p. 465).
These questions can be answered only by contextualising, by looking at specific
cultural instances in which these dynamics unfurl.1 This is why we began with that
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representation of Quebec City, and why we now examine the commonalities and differences
that arise from making the leap, as it were, to another instance, the phenomenon of parkour.
Parkour, art du déplacement, free running, urban free flow, are variations of a youth
movement which began in a banlieue of Paris. It was founded in Lisses, a commune - whose
population has increased tenfold to 8,000 in the forty years since 1968 - near the new town of
Evry in the Essonne department 30 kilometres south of Paris, by David Belle (b. 1973) –
partly inspired by the fire rescue tradition in his family (his father was in the army in IndoChina before becoming a firefighter) - and Sébastien Foucan (b. 1974) in the late 1980s. A
variety of running leaps, flips and acrobatics aims to find new pathways – parcours – through
the (sub)urban environment of the banlieue: „Courir, sauter, grimper, maîtriser l‟équilibre,
gérer le stress, développer toutes les qualités physiques et morales nécessaires pour ne pas
être bloqué par l‟obstacle, sont les valeurs qui font le parkour‟
(http://www.sportmediaconcept.com/parkour/). Clearly, this renegotiation of the
environment, in which the meaning of walls, parapets, rooves, bollards, is transformed in a
new urban journey, is grist to the mill for those seeking, like de Certeau, to emphasise the
popular energy and meaning-creation which exceeds the grids of administration and urban
planning. De Certeau takes the supremely kinetic example of Charlie Chaplin, and extends it
to the modern urban stroller, but it is clear that this is a description avant la lettre of the
practices of parkour:
[Chaplin] fait d‟autres choses avec la même chose et il outrepasse les limites que
fixaient à son utilisation les déterminations de l‟objet. De même, le marcheur
transforme en autre chose chaque signifiant spatial (...) il accroît le nombre des
possibles (par exemple, en créant des raccourcis ou des détours) et celui des interdits
(par exemple, il s‟interdit des chemins tenus pour licites ou obligatoires) (...) Il crée
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ainsi du discontinu, soit en opérant des tris dans les signifiants de la <<langue>>
spatiale, soit en les décalant par l‟usage qu‟il en fait (de Certeau, p. 149).
Thus the traceur – the practitioner of parkour – is the reply, from the margins that
Haussmannisation first created when it relegated the lower classes from the transformed
„capital of the nineteenth century‟, to the flâneur, famously theorised by Walter Benjamin as
the detached spectator of the fantasmagoria of the new urban spectacle. He is a variant, a
product to an extent also of the age of the motor car that combined velocity and the
confinement of pedestrians to the edges of the street, mediated and made possible by pop
culture such as graffiti, skateboarding and martial arts movies (Belle‟s admiration for Bruce
Lee), of the Situationist dérive, spotting fissures in the organisation of the urban landscape,
creating opportunities for play and for the aesthetic détournement of given pathways and
structures.2 But amid the celebration of this movement from below (inevitably, there is much
evocation of Deleuzian lines of flight, see for example Paula Geyh‟s online piece at
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php), and of the richness of the encounter
between high theory and popular culture, let us recall the need to historicise further.
Here again the Quebec City comparison is enlightening. Clearly, the boys in Sur le
toit des maisons „do‟ a form of parkour without knowing it, negotiating obstacles (Gobeil, p.
29), helping each other as they look for opportunities and routes (p. 35), and their story is
very much a boys‟ one, with hints of the homoerotic (p. 51). (The child-like aspect of their
activity is echoed by Foucan in the Jump London DVD, „you just have to think like
children‟.) But in this place shaped, if we focus on colonialism, by the first French Empire,
the British Empire, and also perhaps the American Empire of consumerism and the market,
banlieue has a very different meaning. For the Quebec (inner) City boys, it is „le royaume des
autobus scolaires‟, in French terms a banlieue pavillonaire the critique of which is central to
North American culture (American Beauty, dir, Sam Mendes, 1999; Desperate Housewives).
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Quebec culture shares this emphasis on middle-class conformity and routine (another Quebec
City novel for example, Haine-moi!, confronts the suburbs with the lumpen elements of the
Old Town via the itinerary of young protagonists), as Gobeil‟s narrator thus sees the
suburbanites:
ceux qui avaient choisi ces coins retirés avaient des familles avec des chiens, des
bateaux, des autos avec des stéréos, des piscines avec des systèmes de chauffage, mais
[...] ils ne se baladaient jamais sur les toits des villes la nuit (Gobeil, p. 108).
The different connotations of the banlieue in French are products of many other histories – of
post-war planning, modernist architecture, urbanism - but the failure of the republican model
which they represent is also of course bound up with colonialism and post-colonialism: postwar immigration, the unresolved aftermath of the Algerian War, the continuation of colonial
police methods in spaces which reproduce the manicheism of the colonial city, a ghettoisation
that is experienced in ethnic and racial terms (see the analyses, for example, of Lapeyronnie,
2008). Parkour is, needless to say, very métissé and multiethnic; David Belle has the IndoChina connection, Sébastien Foucan‟s parents are from Guadeloupe.
De Certeau‟s emphasis on the links between colonialism and the carte, and all it
entails, while sweeping, are consistent with this historicisation. However, we also must bear
in mind the ambivalences of parkour‟s own history, as it demonstrates how de Certeau‟s
fields of forces are always characterised by a tension. Colonialism, including ambivalent
relations to the exotic, plays a major role in the history of physical education in France. One
of the sources for Belle of parkour was the „méthode naturelle‟ associated with Georges
Hébert (1875-1957). Hébert was a French naval officer involved in the rescue following the
eruption at St Pierre in Martinique in 1902, and who in his service came to admire the
corporeal qualities and abilities of indigenous peoples. On his return to France he became a
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physical education tutor at Reims, and produced before and after World War I a number of
manuals on his theories. Hébertisme gave rise to the parcours du combattant which is the
basis for military obstacle courses today (for example, Hébert, 1912; on Hébert see Griffet,
1998, and Villaret and Delaplace, 2003), and has also been used in fire service training.
Parkour could be seen as a counter-cultural hijacking of these practices and histories, or, at
least in part, consistent with them. However, a look at two recent French cinematic texts
reveals that ambivalences are displayed, not only in the putting into narrative of parkour
practices, as we have seen, but in their spectacularisation. Here the scopic aspect of the
phenomenon we observed in Quebec City and Sur le toit des maisons – histories of the view,
different ways of looking at and perceiving the cityscape as it is moved through, temptations
of the panoptic – is magnified by the reality of being looked at as well as looking.
The parkour boom has partly been a classic case of subcultural proliferation, aided by
the internet and YouTube, with groups forming across the world (see for example
www.glasgowparkour.co.uk). Older paradigms of (sub)cultural analysis tended to focus on
the relationship between symbolic violations of the social order and the processes of
„incorporation‟ which then recuperated or co-opted them by propelling them into generalised
processes of commodification, or by some ideological sleight of hand. Thus Dick Hebdige,
for example, wrote of the way in which, in the case of 1970s punk, the success of some
individuals reinforced the idea of social mobility and of an open society, thus contradicting
the premises of the movement itself (Hebdige, 1979, especially pp. 92-99). Certainly much
„mainstreaming‟ has occurred in the case of parkour, in the form of music, video games, film
(Sébastien Foucan‟s appearance in the opening scenes of Casino Royale, dir. Martin
Campbell, 2006), marketing (http://www.parkour-online.com/parkour-shop.html) and
corporate sponsorship (figure 3). It may be possible to make a case, as with Lawrence
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Grossberg‟s analysis of rock and roll, for parkour, which is splitting into different emphases
and styles, to be seen as „a fractured unity within which differences of authenticity and
cooptation are defined in the construction of affective alliances and networks of affiliation‟,
alliances which „are always multiple and contradictory‟ (Grossberg 1997, p. 493). However,
we have seen that parkour itself is already marked by ambivalent and complex relations to
any binary oppositions around order and resistance. What is more useful is to trace its
specific operations when it is put, as we have seen, into narrative and spectacle in specific
contexts.
The first feature film to use parkour was Yamakasi - les samouraïs des temps
modernes (2001), directed by Ariel Zeitoun and with a script by, among others, Luc Besson
for his production company Europa Corp. He conceived the project with Charles Perrière,
who plays „Sitting Bull‟ in the film and who was an original member of Belle and Foucan‟s
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„yamakasi‟ (Ya makási means „strong in body and spirit and as a person‟ in the Lingala
language of the two Congos) group of traceurs in Lisses. The cast also includes Williams
Belle and Châu Belle Dinh. To an extent, the film is thus a continuation of the action or chase
movie genre developed in Besson‟s other productions such as the phenomenally successful
Taxi series that began in 1998, along with the combination of youth culture and postmodern
irony that characterises many of his films as director (Subway, 1985). Yamakasi has a simple,
goal-oriented narrative in which the ethnically diverse septet of traceurs races against time to
obtain money (through the burglary of the Parisian homes of wealthy hospital board
members) for an organ transplant that will save the life of a young boy who injured himself in
the banlieue while trying to imitate their feats. The Law/not Law distinction inherent to the
popular thriller is played out via a Robin Hood-style humanism, in which „coeur‟ is explicitly
posited against „loi‟ (in an early verbal confrontation with police Inspector Vincent) and,
against the excessive force used by the agents of the state, the use of a gun is limited to
bringing down an opulent chandelier on the heads of their pursuers. What remains is the
agility, the expertise of the traceurs as they confront their antagons, namely the bureaucracy
and incompetence of both petty and powerful officials (hospital receptionist, police chief,
conseiller politique who refers to them as racaille). In this, the young men are little different
from James Bond or other heroic figures of the popular thriller, whose skills are often posited
against the compromises and rigidities of the organisations they work for, and whose
masculine bodies are put through a series of tests over which they triumph. However, it is the
traceurs‟s feats that are spectacular, their bodies more lithe - in constant flow and movement
– than those of action hero icons such as Bruce Willis or even Daniel Craig. Needless to say,
the role of women is marginalised (worried female relatives of the sick Djamel, one female
love interest embraced at the end) and the action relentlessly homosocial, but the absence of
individual Oedipal trajectories (castration threats overcome, integration into the social order
18
through heterosexual coupledom) is noteworthy. There are collective identities at stake here,
the „nous‟ of the banlieue against the „beaux quartiers‟ of Paris, but even the nature of
„France‟ itself: „On est en France, on n‟abandonnera pas les enfants comme ça‟, cries the
intermediary beur police figure Vincent, and it is perhaps significant that at the end he resigns
from the police rather than re-integrating the lessons learned into its structures.
That these are mild challenges to the social order is the least one can say. Life in the
banlieue is barely explored, but the extreme polarisation between Paris and banlieue to be
found in Kassowitz‟ La Haine (1995) here turns into a reappropriation of the capital city by
the traceurs, as for the first time they are filmed running across the rooftops of Haussmann‟s
city. This is a marketing strategy, of course (the posters for the film emphasise the Parisian
landmarks that form the backdrop, see figure 4), but, as David Thomson points out, it means
that attention is redrawn to the (capital, in both senses) city itself, and the way that parkour as
„an instance of the unruly intersection between capital flow and human bodies‟ may
demonstrate the way „they may intersect at angles of varying and appositional intensities‟
(Thomson, 2008, pp. 251-252). The flying traceur framed against a backdrop of official or
commercial city centre buildings is contributing to a new aesthetics of the city which
defamiliarises by reawakening past histories and suggesting new futures, as well as new
pathways.
While Yamakasi had the traceurs running away from the police, Banlieue 13 (dir.
Pierre Morel, 2004, again with a script by Besson- co-written with one of the stars, Bibi
Naceri, who plays the drug baron Taha – and produced by Eurocorp), eventually has them
19
running alongside, and, what is more, in a non-place and non-time. In the near future, the
eponymous banlieue has been surrounded by a wall since 2010, its two million inhabitants
left to rot without state services. The narrative brings together Leïto (a starring acting role for
David Belle), who has fallen foul of Taha and wishes to rescue his sister from him, and
Captain Damien Tamaso of the police (played by stunt man/choreographer and former circus
acrobat Cyril Raffaelli), who has been sent into the district undercover, ostensibly to defuse a
neutron bomb that has fallen into Taha‟s hands and risks killing all the inhabitants. However,
it emerges that the bomb has deliberately been placed there by the government in order to
20
eradicate banlieue 13. Leïto and Damien defuse the bomb and expose the plot, and the wall
comes down.
On the one hand, Banlieue 13 in terms of spectacle completes the appropriation of
parkour for action cinema. Apart from the thrilling opening chase scene as Leïto evades
Taha‟s gang, it is here mostly adapted for combat, Leïto even using it to kill a police official
who had abandoned his sister Lola (Dany Verissimo) to Taha. The trajectories cross a
generic, undifferentiated space, as sequences were filmed not only in various Parisian suburbs
but also in Romania. On the other, its associations with banlieue counter-culture lead to a
bizarre ideological operation. It is clear from two, let us call them „political‟ discussions
between Leïto and Damien that within the narrative structure the two men represent a
dialectic that the ending of the film must resolve. (Indeed, Lola as non-sexual object to be
rescued – although she has her own brief action sequence and is crucial to making safe the
bomb – is consistent with this emphasis on the male-male relationship.) In the first, Damien
critiques Leïto‟s emphasis on „hatred‟ by invoking an alternative „education‟, that is „liberté,
égalité, fraternité‟. Leïto is initially resistant to this, but the two come together around shared
„values‟, especially equality before the law. Their relationship seesaws: in the second
conversation, Leïto accepts with a slightly ridiculous nod Damien‟s proposition that he is not
defending (powerful) individuals: „c‟est des valeurs, les mêmes que toi si j‟ai bien compris,
non‟; but at the film‟s climax he is proven right about the malign purpose of the authorities.
The problem turns out to be not enough republicanism (the breaking of the republican pact
that removes education and police services from the district), rather than the republican
model itself: the evil (individual) politician is foiled through „democracy‟ not violence, in an
appeal to the democratic public sphere (the mass media, here given voice by Patrick Poivre
d‟Arvor). The accompanying DVD interviews with filmmakers are therefore somewhat
disingenuous in their claims for the relevance of the social commentary here (despite, a year
21
before the November 2005 crisis, the references to „racaille‟ and the burning of cars, half
condoned here as a way of expressing grievance) because this dystopian future is
outlandishly more „other‟ to the present day than it is the „same‟: next to a radiation bomb
meant to kill two million, contemporary metaphors about ghettos or claims about
underfunded schools pale somewhat in comparison. And if the future contains these quasifascist elements, they are in fact easily overcome, by media exposure in what therefore is
presumably still a democratic state. Fanon famously wrote about the colonial city:
La ville du colonisé, ou du moins la ville indigène (...) est un lieu malfamé, peuplé
d‟hommes malfamés. On y naît n‟importe où, n‟importe comment. On y meurt
n‟importe où, de n‟importe quoi (...). La ville du colonisé est une ville accroupie, une
ville à genoux, une ville vautrée (Fanon, 1968, p. 8).
In Banlieue 13, the historical memory that is invoked is that of the holocaust (Damien: „on a
déjà tué six millions sous le prétexte qu‟ils n‟étaient pas blonds aux yeux bleus‟), the
opposition between republicanism and fascism constituting a safe and tidy reference for the
film, the Warsaw ghetto (created by the Other) rather than the much more ambivalent
memories of the colonial city or even apartheid. These incoherences – part of course, of
another imaginary resolution of real contradictions - in fact point to a form of „inoculation‟,
contrasting a worse future – where nonetheless wrongs can still be put right - with a present
now rendered more acceptable.
The point of Banlieue 13, is, of course, the action and spectacle, but it represents
perhaps a limit-case of the way in which the myriad possibilities – and ambiguities - of
parkour can here be channelled to monological ends and indeed „strategies‟ (industrialcinematic, political). That the phenomenon is characterised by tensions, like de Certeau‟s
own categories, has been clear throughout this analysis. There can be no global evaluation or
22
judgement of it, because it can be understood only in relation to its specific manifestations
and contexts, including the medium in which they are represented, the historicity of a place,
the life of an individual. For example, in the latter case, there are grounds for a wide-ranging
sociological (and cultural) qualitative analysis of the discourse and stories woven by its
practitioners, of its relation for them to place, identity, France, the transnational. In this way,
embedded in often contradictory assemblages which bring together architectures and histories
of empire and nation, parkour might help us to understand, not how to intervene, but how to
live – to look and to move – in the contemporary phase of global capitalist culture.
Notes
1. For an interesting analysis, based on de Certeau‟s categories, of the colonial city of
Fort-de-France and its representations, see: Loichot, V. (2004) „Fort-de-France:
Pratiques textuelles et corporelles d‟une ville coloniale‟, French Cultural Studies, vol.
15, no. 48, pp. 48-60.
2. Amid the abundant literature – almost entirely web-based – on parkour, see the
summary by Shawn Shahani, „Parkour: the Evolution of the Disparate Tradition‟
(http://shawnshahani.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/parkour-a-european-disparatetradition/), who asks, „Is the traceur just a practicing flâneur with locomotive purpose
or a drifting Situationist with a concerted mindset?‟
Figures
1. Quebec City in Claude-Charles Le Roy de La Potherie Histoire de l’Amérique
septentrionale (1722).
2. James Pattison Cockburn‟s The Lower City of Quebec, from the Parapet of the Upper
City (1833).
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3. The corporate sponsorship of parkour at the Mayor‟s Thames Festival, September
2008.
4. Poster for Yamakasi.
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